The Few Things I Know About Glafkos Thrassakis

A brilliant work of the imagination as well as a meditation on writing itself, the story follows a biographer’s investigation into the life and works of a famous, yet highly mysterious, deceased Greek author named Glafkos Thrassakis. At the crossroads where magical realism and political fiction meet, Vassilis Vassilikos’s buoyant literary imagination flourishes beyond the confines of conventional narrative structures.“A deft and witty reflection on writing as well as a moving portrait of the artist as political exile. . . . These passages recall Kundera at his most charmingly discursive. Yet whenever the book seems to be taking a reflective, historical direction, the biographer intrudes with ever more fantastical spy-novel details. . . . By turns moving and scathingly satirical . . . Vassilikos has been too rarely translated into English; one can only hope this complex, multilayered novel will change that.” –Mary Park, New York Times Book ReviewBorn in 1933 in Kavalla in Northern Greece, VASSILIS VASSILIKOS grew up mostly in Salonika. After the military coup in 1967, he spent seven years in exile, returning to Greece in 1974. Author of some 120 books, translated into more than twenty foreign languages, Vassilikos is Greece's formost living novelist. His novel, Z, was adapted for film by Costa Gavras, winning the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 1969.